It's Already a War

I was listening to a news show the other night, and when it got to this part, I paused it, re-listened, and then set up so I could later transcribe it. Next morning, Mr. Spherical Model had seen the same news show, and when I told him a part had gotten my attention, he guessed it was this part. Let’s proceed before further comment.

The daily news broadcast is Crossroads, with Joshua Philipp, a production of The Epoch Times. This is from late Friday, August 21, 2020. CCP refers to Chinese Communist Party.

Joshua Philipp reporting on CCP role in US riots
screenshot from here

The Chinese regime may have played a hand in the mass protests and the riots that have been sweeping across the United States. They’ve allegedly identified and sent guidance to people who are aligned with Black Lives Matter and the far-left radical organization Antifa. This is according to a recent article by Radio Free Asia, which also noted the CCP’s actions played a role in the US ordering the closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston.

According to the story, the CCP had sent soldiers from the Second Department of its General Staff Department to the Chinese consulate in Houston. They were equipped with fake IDs as well. From there they used data from a large video platform to identify people whose interests suggested that they may participate in protests around Black Lives Matter and Antifa, and then created and sent them customized videos on how to organize riots and how to spread their messages. The story does not name the companies that were involved in the operations.

Now, this is interesting from a few different angles. When it comes to the soldiers the CCP sent to the consulate, the General Staff Department is the war fighting branch of the Chinese military. The Second Department, the spy branch, operates alongside its Signals Intelligence Branch known for its military hackers, which is a Third Department. You might remember those individuals indicted during the Obama administration with unit 61398. Those were Third Department.

Now, why were spies from the war fighting branch of China’s military sent to the United States to stir up unrest?

It’s also interesting that soldiers from the CCP’s military spy agency were sent to the United States with fake IDs. This may relate to the recent announcement from US Customs and Border Protection that it seized close to 20,000 fake IDs in Chicago and said the majority of them had arrived from China.

When it comes to the CCP getting involved in the protests and riots in the United States, it’s also interesting to note that Russia was found to have done something very similar ahead of the US elections in 2016. And now that we move on to the 2020 elections, this is a big deal in that context. This is among the few points that were used as evidence of Russia meddling in the elections. The Russian trolls were exposed for buying advertisements in different social media platforms that promoted civil unrest.

And as Slate noted at the time, the findings emerged that “Russian trolls were obsessed with Black Lives Matter.” Part of this ties to long-running operations around ideological subversion. These were Soviet era methods of demoralizing and destabilizing a country. Part of the idea was to encourage and to accelerate what would have otherwise been grassroots unrest.

The CCP appears to have taken this even further, however, by deploying soldiers on American soil, then using big data technology to identify and target Americans directly, with their guidelines on how to organize riots.

In Shanghai, meanwhile, the personal information of more than 1.9 million Communist Party members was leaked. And The Epoch Times received Excel files containing details on CCP members in Shanghai’s municipal government institutions and businesses. The leaked records contain names, birthplace, ID numbers, home addresses, and communication information of the Shanghai members of the Chinese Communist Party. And Epoch Times was able to confirm the legitimacy of these documents. The leaked list of party members began to circulate online after the United States announced potential visa restrictions on CCP members and their families. While the documents were only leaked recently, it does appear they come from as early as July 2016.

And why does this matter? This adds to fear among CCP officials, both of the discussions are on travel restrictions on CCP members, and of the possibility that they could be hit by US sanctions for carrying out abusive orders from the Chinese Communist Party.

Interesting.

This is the Radio Free Asia story referred to, which I had Google translate for me: “The last straw that overwhelms the Houston Consulate.” Here’s a key statement:

According to reports, the Second Department of the General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army recruited people from a major Internet company, used false identities to go to the Houston consulate, used the background data of a major audio-visual platform in the powerful country [China] to assist BLM and ANTIFA, and sent "tailor-made" to African Americans. A promotional video for the riot organization; in a word, it is to "weaponize" big data.

Photo from Reuters profile, found here.

The Epoch Times is more attuned to China news than most outlets, and Joshua Philipp’s report in particular tends to cover China news before other world news. But wasn’t this a huge story that ought to be appearing elsewhere?

Earlier today I came across one other source. This is a story by Texas writer Bryan Preston for PJ Media, “Did China’s Consulate in Houston Use TikTok to Stir Up Antifa BLM Riots?” He refers to the same Radio Free Asia “ChinaScope” story, and observes this:

If this ChinaScope report is true, and the Houston Chinese consulate was the hub of unrest via TikTok, it makes sense of the recent events noted above. It also makes some sense of the riots themselves. Antifa got its start as the communists’ street fighters in Weimar Germany. Black Lives Matters’ leaders have openly stated they are trained Marxists. The strongest communist regime on earth today is the one in Beijing under its most authoritarian leader in decades, Xi Jinping. The rioters’ goal is not any particular policy outcome, but to subvert and weaken America. Destroying our cities, defunding law enforcement, agitating against ICE, and dividing America along racial lines all support the goal of weakening the United States, which happens to be China’s long-term foreign policy goal.

The part of the story that is not new related to TikTok, and Thousand Talents, a CCP effort to infiltrate and subvert US science and medical research. It related to the spying coming out of China's recently closed Houston consulate, among other consulates to be closed. Preston says this:

That talent plan is Thousand Talents, a large and sprawling effort on the part of the Chinese Communist Party to subvert top-level researchers in the United States and across the free world in a variety of key fields and buy their research, which is turned over to the People’s Liberation Army. That’s China’s ironically named military, which liberates no one, threatens its own citizens, and helps maintain the communists’ police state. Thousand Talents has been uncovered and several arrests have been made this year, including the high-profile arrest of Dr. Charles Lieber of Harvard. Lieber is one of the world’s top nanoscientists. The Department of Justice accuses him of secretly working for the communists in Beijing via the Wuhan University of Technology.

Someone passed along a video to me today, of a dad in California, whose child’s school lesson on day 4 was pro-Black Lives Matter, under the pretense of teaching against racism, which he got to see because they're doing distance learning. (This propaganda to kids is yet another reason to homeschool.)

Screenshot (flipped) from here

I was curious about that raised fist symbol, which I remember as a black power symbol over many decades. According to Wikipedia,

The black fist, also known as the Black Power fist is a logo generally associated with Black nationalism, defiance, solidarity, and socialism. Its most widely known usage is by the Black Panther Party, a socialist group, in the 1960s. 

Wikipedia also informs us,

Different movements sometimes use different terms to describe the raised fist salute: amongst communists and socialists, raised right fist is sometimes called the red salute, whereas amongst some African-American activists, especially in the United States it has been called the Black Power salute. The Rotfrontkämpferbund paramilitary organization of Communist Party of Germany used the right hand fist salute as early as 1924. 

Different organizations may add elements to use it for their purposes. One example is the hammer and sickle being combined with it, used as part of communist symbolism.

Interestingly, the raised fist is also used by officials in China when being sworn into office.

The symbolism is just another clue. These are the same forces fighting a war against our liberty for a very long time.

Black Lives Matter is Marxist. (And, I might as well add, so is Antifa, which is about as anti-fascist as Nazi Germany of the 1930s-1940s was.) BLM has been open about that on their website, and their founders brag of being “trained Marxists.” Who trains a Marxist? Somebody already steeped in that philosophy. Rumors have flown about George Soros funding. I wouldn’t discount that; he’s definitely an authoritarian, and a Marxist, with a stated intention of bringing down the United States, as well as other countries.

Another possibility is Russia. They’ve worked against the US since—well, probably since they became Marxist at the inception of the Soviet Union. But they’ve been weakened recently. And even in 2016 their efforts were a relatively minor continuation of ongoing disinformation practices.

Then there’s China—the largest and most threatening Marxist regime on the planet. We have a president who has stood up to them, and the US is both their biggest rival economically and philosophically. That is, the real America, with a constitution that is antithetical in every way to Marxist authoritarian rule. Wouldn’t it be in their interest to attempt to get the US to collapse from within?

Preston ends with this:

This report, if true, connects several dots and casts the riots of the past few months in a new light. It’s an effort on the part of a hostile regime to weaken our nation’s integrity. Its leaders and operators on U.S. soil are, knowingly or not, doing the bidding of a hostile foreign government.

To summarize, for clarity, the Chinese government has been conducting a war against the United States. At this point it is a cold war, rather than a full-on hot one, but a war nevertheless. They have put their military on US soil. And they have been targeting Americans to recruit to the anti-American side.

The protests you are seeing—the supposed peaceful ones, where it’s just about speaking out against racism—those are a propaganda movement. Those attending have been targeted through social media to have their opinions manipulated; their news has been controlled so they don’t see another side. What ought to be a reliable US media has been willfully complicit.

And what about the riots—the actual violence against property and people, such as has been going on for 13 weeks and counting in Portland, as well as elsewhere around the country? A few rioters might be opportunists. But mainly those are people targeted, recruited, and trained by our enemy, a Marxist authoritarian regime, in league with other Marxists around the world, intent on the overthrow of our Constitution and the subjugation of free American people.

Next time someone insists that you have to support Black Lives Matter or you’re a racist—let them know that you know the truth. If they’re really about making America better, they’ll hear you. If they won’t hear you, they’re among those targeted and recruited by our deadliest enemy.

Do you give up on such a person? It depends on how much you love and care about that individual, and how much energy you can devote to deprogramming them while we’re in a war in defense of our liberty, our lands, our families, and our religion[i].

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[i] Alma48:10 uses this list and calls it the cause of Christians.

Concerns, Part II

We started this two-part post about concerns, in Part I, with a look at The Book Thief, a novel about a young girl in Nazi Germany in the early 1940s. The main questions we’re looking at are:

How does a free, civilized people become subject, in a rather short time-frame, to undeniable tyranny? And how many in the population are willing to submit before even the unwilling are also subjected?

Today we’re looking at America, present day, concerned about what's happening, because we ought to know better.

* The other day I referred to a Bill Whittle Afterburner video. About halfway through, Whittle says this:

Now, some people have said that Obama is being petty and adolescent by deploying the new gestapo, that Smoky the Bear hat wearing National Park Service, as his primary weapon in making things hurt for the American people. It’s not just barricades erected by supposedly furloughed rangers in order to keep the American patriots that kept this country free from freely walking through the monuments erected to their dead friends and to they themselves. It’s things like keeping people on buses to keep them from even taking photographs of the national parks that we the people, not King Obama, actually own. It’s things like removing the handles from taps on hiking trails so that people can’t get a drink, and a list of shameful, shocking, eye-opening jackboot tactics to make sure his pain is felt—not allow it to be felt, but to make it be felt—goes on and on and on. And of all the things I’ve seen that have worried, depressed, and angered me since this hope and change huckster came to the Oval Office, nothing has disgusted and worried me so much as the willingness, the ease—in fact, in many cases the relish and the joy—at which formerly innocuous seeming people like park rangers have taken to kicking the American people in the groin. I will never forget this—not ever. And while I used to wonder where a dictator’s private army would come from among formerly free people—well, I wonder no more.

That use of regular, friendly neighborhood park rangers—who are willing to do as they’re told when they’re asked to do something obviously wrong—is disturbing. It’s a concern. No panic yet. We’re not expecting park rangers to beat any of us for sharing bread with a hungry stranger. But how far would they go, just doing what they’re told, before saying, “No, I won’t do that?” We don’t know.

photo from here

* Here’s another story that is cause for concern. Police took a flag from a veteran during a visit to the WWII Memorial. It looks like the veteran carrying the flag was in a wheelchair. But was he waving it, possibly risking hitting those around him? According to this report, no: he wasn’t doing anything but holding it. So police, who in pretty much my whole lifetime, have been considered the friend of law-abiding citizens, look here like recruits of an anti-freedom tyrannical overlord. At this point just the DC park police, and maybe only some specific bad apple. Still, cause for concern, though not yet panic.

* Here’s yet another puzzling piece: Veterans are being told that someone who doesn’t know them, some unknown Veterans Administration government bureaucrat, will determine their mental/emotional/physical competence. If this stranger determines you are not competent, you may be deprived of your ability to make your own financial decisions, and/or you may no longer have your second amendment right to own/purchase/use guns and ammo. The link will lead you do an actual letter sample. There have been thousands sent out. Some of the recipients can guess that it is because they sought help for PTSD, or temporary depression, or something else they sought help coping with. But these aren’t individuals who consider their problem disabling—or even still currently relevant. And many recipients can’t identify any conceivable reason for the notice. Their being a veteran seems to be the only contributing factor.

I know you can’t always believe everything you find on the internet (even here, despite my efforts at finding and revealing truth). But when I look at this story, it appears credible. The piece is written by Michael Connelly, Executive Director of the United States Justice Foundation, who writes a blog and teaches on constitutional issues. At this point I haven’t evaluated the reliability of the story. But if it is true, and it’s kept quiet so we aren't told elsewhere, this is more than just a minor concern. It’s the kind of thing a conspiracy theorist would come up with: government is determined to disarm the very citizens best trained and experienced in defense against enemies foreign and domestic.

* Another story this week was about a woman working for the government, taking calls to help people navigate the impossibly flawed (“glitchy”) Obamacare website. She had the misfortune of taking a friendly call from Sean Hannity from his radio show. He was kind to her and thanked her for how nice she was. But she apparently made a fatal error by admitting (in a job where she takes complaints) that a lot of calls she takes are from people who don’t like Obamacare. She was fired. As Bryan Preston of PJ Media put it,

This firing makes Erling Davis, not Kathleen Sebelius or any of the contractors who messed up the website, the first person held accountable for any problems with Healthcare.gov. The first person held accountable by the Obama administration is a person at the very bottom of the regime, who makes no decisions that impact the implementation of the law at all.

Just let that sink in.

Who fired her? How far up the chain was the decision to fire her made? What reasons were given for her firing?

Those are among the questions that the most secretive administration we’ve ever had will never answer.

Saying something the government doesn’t approve of is enough to get you fired; messing up the finances and health care of millions of Americans is just doing the job. Sean Hannity stepped in, by the way, to offer the woman a year’s salary to get her by until she gets a job, because he felt bad for getting her in trouble.

* The president gave a speech shortly after the government reopened in which he gave this warning:

And now that the government is reopened, and this threat to our economy is removed, all of us need to stop focusing on the lobbyists, and the bloggers, and the talking heads on radio, and the professional activists who profit from conflict, and focus on what the majority of Americans sent us here to do.

Who are the villains? Well, of course lobbyists—people who sway government; the very cronies this president gives favors to but doesn’t want you to believe he’s in bed with. Then there are bloggers. He has just warned you about me; I’m not to be heeded. Neither are radio hosts, flippantly referred to as talking heads, even though on radio you don’t see their heads, while on TV news, which is much more aligned with his propaganda, you do see talking heads. Then he mentions “professional activists,” as if that isn’t the only kind of job he himself ever had. So, translate that to “evil conservative patriot activists,” like the ones the IRS targeted—not the actual paid professional ones like ACORN and subsidiaries that this president got paid to train in their tactics.

This is a little like the Wizard of Oz telling Dorothy, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” Translation: “Don’t notice evidence of truth; only notice and believe what I tell you to notice and believe.” As a blogger, my role in the story is Toto, the little dog pulling back the curtain on truth. That’s not an ignoble character to play. Even though we might not be “in Kansas anymore”—in the American freedom world we grew up assuming was our home—Toto is still perfectly capable of sniffing around and pulling back the curtain.

At this point, the president’s call for avoiding unsanctioned information sources doesn’t actually stop someone like me from posting. So his anti-conservative-voices rhetoric is a concern, but not yet a reason to panic. So far this still sounds like paranoia, but if voices like mine ever get shut down—then we’re beyond concern and into reason for panic. Just saying, while I can.

Benghazi Boondoggle

I’m trying to make sense of this chain of confusion surrounding the attack on our ambassador in Libya on September 11, 2012. You’d think after more than a month we could get a basic story. Instead we get obfuscation.

The President's Rose Garden Speech 9-12-2012
photo found here

In the debate on Tuesday, Romney got the President to go on record as saying he knew within 24 hours of the event that it was a terrorist attack—the President even claimed he had said so at the time in his speech in the White House Rose Garden and suggested checking the transcript. As if moderator Candy Crowley was keeping a spare copy in a capacious handbag (she did step in and incorrectly support the President, which she had to walk back later).

Finding both a transcript and the 5-minute speech on video of the Rose Garden speech was no problem. I missed the word “terror” the first two times I listened. Finally I found it with a careful reading. It is, as the conservatives have been pointing out since, in reference to the original 9/11 attack and terror attacks in general, which he brings up in the previous paragraph, near the end of the speech, not, by my reading, in reference to the Benghazi attack. What a silly thing to be arguing about. Even when he calls something terrorism, he talks of it as simply a more heinous crime than most crimes, and refers to bringing the specific perpetrators to justice; he doesn’t recognize terrorism as an act of war perpetrated by our nation’s enemies. So, even if he called it terrorism, which he didn’t, he didn’t use the term the way the rest of us use it. But there’s still the obfuscation.

Throughout the Rose Garden speech he talks about the anti-Muslim video that supposedly set off the spontaneous protest, a video that logged only 17 YouTube views between being uploaded July 2^nd and September 10^th, the day before the attack. Except—now we know there was no spontaneous protest. We also know that Charlene Lamb, National Security agent under Hillary Clinton, was able to see video surveillance of the attack in real time, so it was instantly known that there was no protest springing up from a video. Unlike the same day in Egypt, there was only a pre-planned thoroughly executed targeted attack—on the anniversary of 9/11. There are reports that the administration had been warned of a possible attack 2-3 days ahead. And there are arguments about who had failed to provide additional security, which may have been directly requested. So, no video-related protest. Nor did intel ever suggest the obscure video was related in any way; someone in the administration put that out without any supporting evidence.

Hillary Clinton denounces the video on September 13^th, and repeats the claim September 14^th. White House Spokesman Jay Carney puts forward the video-protest story in a press briefing also on September 14^th. UN Ambassador Susan Rice (an odd choice of spokesperson, since she wasn’t in any chain of command in intelligence or national security) is sent out to do the rounds of Sunday talk shows on September 16^th, with the instruction that she should insist the Benghazi attack was the result of this obscure video. September 18^th the President repeats the claim on David Letterman’s show.

On September 19^th, finally someone in the administration admits they know it was an act of terrorism: National Counterterrorism Director Matthew Olsen, to the Senate Homeland Security Committee, says, “I would say yes, they were killed in the course of a terrorist attack on our embassy.”

But then, on September 25^th, yet another six days later, a full two weeks after the event, Obama makes the claim six times in his speech to the UN.

If he knew it was a planned terrorist attack (as we all knew within 24 hours, so presumably the President was aware as well), why did he insist on bringing up the irrelevant video at all, and why cling to that story so relentlessly for so long?

More speculation and stories come out daily, so we don’t really know the answer yet, but here are some of the speculations I’ve seen:

·         The President has a stake in putting forth the idea that Islam ought to be protected (with many sub-speculations on why he would take it upon himself to do that).

·         “Being hit with the worst terror attack since 9/11—in a city we saved—would have exposed Obama's boasting about his Libya triumph and al-Qaida being "on the run" and "on the path to defeat" as absurd propaganda.  Al-Qaida is now in Libya, Mali, Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Pakistan….But we can't let folks find that out until after Nov. 6.” (Pat Buchanan’s theory)

·         There was no security leak about Ambassador Stevens’s location, his travel to Benghazi and a safe house; President Obama himself had arranged for Stevens to meet with Libyan rebels to negotiate for the recovery of weapons the US had provided to them (during the Arab Spring uprising?), and these rebels turned out to be his attackers.

·         Obama arranged with the Muslim Brotherhood to kidnap Ambassador Stevens, with the idea that, because of Obama’s warm relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, he would save the day by arranging for the Ambassador’s release—in exchange for secretly releasing the Blind Sheik. But the Muslim Brotherhood didn’t go along with the original plan.

Some of these seem more suited for action-thriller fiction than news. We don’t yet know the background of what happened. But I can guarantee that there is no non-nefarious reason for the President of the United States to make up as scapegoat an irrelevant video, telling and re-telling this falsehood to the American people, and failing even yet to explain why.

I would like this question to come up at Monday’s foreign policy debate:

Mr. President, since it is now known that the Benghazi attack was a planned terrorist attack, and that this fact was known by the State Department even as the attack was underway, why did the White House assert and persist in the fiction that this was a spontaneous protest reacting to an obscure, almost unviewed amateur video? It appears there was purposeful disinformation given to the American people. Where did the claim of the video as cause come from (the agency, position or rank, if you’d rather not reveal a name), and why was this claim continued against all evidence for so long?

I would accept this alternative question (inspired by BryanPreston in reference to Obama’s book):

Mr. President, on page 261 of your book The Audacity of Hope, you declare that if the post-9/11 political winds were to shift in an ugly direction against Muslims, you would stand with them. In the Middle East on September 11, 2012, following a terrorist attack in which our Ambassador was murdered along with three other American defenders, you stepped forward to defend the Muslim World against an obscure anti-Muslim video. How do we interpret your allegiance to America based on your words and actions?

Another Bad 9/11

Eleven years after 9/11/2001. It was another disturbing day. Attacks on two of our embassies, in Egypt and Libya. American lives were lost: Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other embassy personnel in Benghazi. While this attack looks planned and timed for the 9/11 anniversary, it is unclear who perpetrated it. The supposedly spontaneous mob attack in Egypt, combining Islamist radicals and teenage soccer fans, may or may not have been coordinated.

But the two attacks are supposedly the result of anger over a YouTube video. Not something the US has sanctioned. Not something the diplomatic corps did wrong. Not even something many Americans are aware of. (No stories I’ve seen have named or linked any video, nor is any such video likely to still exist online, if it was real.)

An embassy, let’s be sure we understand, is the same as the embassy’s home country soil. An attack on an embassy is an attack on the US itself. Any country so attacked is understood to be authorized to retaliate. Civilization requires that we keep sacred our respect for one another’s diplomatic spaces.

To put it another way, if two armies were on the field of battle and one sent out a white flag, an indicator of a desire to speak and consider terms, the enemy would allow safe passage for the ambassador, the messenger with the white flag. What happened yesterday was surrounding the messenger and attacking him, and then cheering that they’d succeeded in killing off a particularly stupid enemy who’d allowed himself to get close enough for attack. Savage jackals behave this way; civilized humans do not.

So what will be the retaliation for this attack upon our sovereign soil? Not sure yet, but the US Embassy in Cairo (a representative of this administration and its policies) responded with this apology:

The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims—as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions. Today, the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans are honoring our patriots and those who serve our nation as the fitting response to the enemies of democracy. Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others. [Emphasis mine.]

The actions of errant videographers are firmly rejected, but there’s not even a weak rejection of the embassy attackers, who were guilty of violating basic laws of civilization. Instead there’s something like, “Oh, we totally understand where you’re coming from. Who wouldn’t savagely attack an embassy when there are offensive things on the internet?” And that last line seems to miss the irony that free speech was much more abused by the attackers, who want to control the speech of everyone around the world, than by some puny individual who may have stepped over a line of good taste. Maybe the video actually is so egregious that a person could be prosecuted for slander, but that hardly qualifies as an excuse for declaring war, which these attacks do.

For good summaries of the attacks, I suggest this Newsmax piece, as well as this commentary by BryanPreston of PJMedia.

What has been happening over the next day or so is telling. Following Tuesday’s administration apology to Egypt and promise to support Libya in bringing perpetrators to justice, Mitt Romney said this:

America will not tolerate attacks against our citizens and our embassies. We will defend, also, our Constitutional rights of speech, assembly, and religion. We have confidence in our cause, and in America. We respect our Constitution. We stand for the principles our Constitution protects. We encourage other nations to understand and respect the principles of our Constitution, because we recognize that these principles are the ultimate source of freedom for individuals around the world.

He also condemned Obama and the administration for their apology and non-response. You probably should view his comments in their entirety, here, because the mainstream media has taken it upon themselves to support the Obama administration in condemning Romney for jumping in before all the facts are known, and you might not get the full context from them.

Romney responded to media outrage (with no apology) that it’s never too soon to stand up for our principles. You have to have principles to know how to respond based on principles, which explains something about Romney’s need to school the administration.

In the meantime, Obama is tinkering with military nearby and trying to quell the obvious assumption that he’s as effective as Carter was the last time we had an ambassador killed (1979). But he didn’t want to interrupt his campaign fundraising schedule, so while dead Americans are still being prepared to be shipped home for funerals, he jetted off to speak to wealthy donors in Las Vegas.

And did we mention that there was one more irritant for Obama on 9/11? Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu asked to speak with him later this month, probably related to Israel’s intentions to protect itself from Iran’s growing nuclear threat. But what with campaign season on, Obama told him he couldn’t fit him in the schedule.

I am not making this up.

We’ve seen 3 ½ years of Obama’s often puzzling other-than-pro-American policies. We don’t know why these are his policies. Dinesh D’Souza’s movie 2016 is an attempt to explain, often using Obama’s own words, which we may need to start believing: “I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction” (The Audacity of Hope, p. 161). Maybe he simply means he would stand up against anti-Muslim bigots. But since most Americans are with him on that, why would he need to stand up against America to do it? And when there’s hugely offensive anti-American bigotry—acted out with death and mayhem by people who call themselves Muslims—why can’t we count on our elected president to use at least a little pro-American backbone at a moment such as this? If he could lead, wouldn’t this be an opportunity, rather than an inconvenience during the campaign?